What is Presence Analytics?

The competition in today’s offline marketplace is fierce. Brick-and-mortar businesses like restaurants and retail establishments are in a constant struggle to stay ahead of their competition, and presence analytics can provide them with a huge advantage. This technology is literally changing the way brick-and-mortar businesses are thinking about marketing.

Presence analytics, also known as location analytics, is the term used for customer behavior data that is collected and tracked in a physical, offline environment. The data collection is done using WiFi technology which is discussed below.

Presence analytics can give businesses a never-before-seen look into their customer behavior and allow them to discover their ideal customer personas and behavior habits, and create highly-targeted marketing campaigns to engage with those customers and keep them coming back again and again.

This post will explain how presence analytics data is collected and stored, what specific data points are typically collected, how to visualize the data, and what the benefits are to having access to these analytics.

How Is Presence Analytics Data Collected and Stored?

Every mobile device, whether a laptop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or smartwatch, has a unique identifying code called a media access control address, or MAC address. This is how individual customers and their behavior will be identified.

If a mobile device's settings have WiFi enabled, then the device is constantly sending out a signal looking for WiFi access points. The MAC address is embedded within that signal.

At the same time, all WiFi access points are "listening" for any device that comes into range. When a new device is in range, its signal - including the MAC address - is logged and a new entry is made into the database for that specific device.

Once logged, the device can be tracked every time it comes into range of the WiFi access point and its behavior data can be collected and stored.

What are the Specific Data Points Available with Presence Analytics?

There are two fundamental sets of data points, or KPIs, when explaining presence analytics - anonymous data points and personalized data points.

When a person with a WiFi enabled device comes within range of your WiFi access point, various anonymous data points can then be captured. With Bloom Intelligence, even if this device never logs into your WiFi, the following data can still be collected and stored about each individual device:

All of the data above can be collected prior to a person ever logging into your WiFi. Once a device does log into your WiFi, personalized data points can be collected, such as:

Name

Email address

Gender

Age

Phone number

Zip code

In addition to these personalized data points, any activity collected in the past will be linked to this device (based on its MAC address) and a full customer profile can then be created. Any future visits will be linked to their individual customer profile.

How To Visualize Your Presence Analytics

In order to see your presence analytics in any decipherable format, you will need a WiFi Analytics and Marketing platform, such as Bloom Intelligence. It's also important to realize that Bloom is one of the only solutions available that will collect presence analytics data prior to a customer logging into WiFi.

It is very easy to visualize your presence analytics with a quality solution like Bloom. All analytics are laid out in an easy-to-understand dashboard. You can view data from any time span, and you can compare different timelines and physical locations.

Bloom also utilizes proprietary algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence to project customer lifetimes, churn rates and other analytics to help business owners run their business more effectively.

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What is the Benefit of Collecting Presence Analytics?

The true value of collecting and visualizing presence analytics lies in getting to know your customers, engaging with them, and getting them to increase frequency and spend through targeted marketing campaigns and friendly engagement.

Once you know who your customers truly are and how they behave at your establishment, you can begin to identify opportunities and correlations to formulate actionable insights that were previously unobtainable.

Using this knowledge, you can optimize staffing and purchasing, and create super-targeted marketing campaigns. And because you're tracking physical behavior and individual customers, you can see accurate ROI on every campaign.

For more information about presence analytics, WiFi marketing and how it can help your business thrive, schedule a free demonstration of Bloom Intelligence here.